


Mirrors Impressionable

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Multi, allusions to Scream of the Shalka
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-18 22:21:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10626306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: A gift for the Doctor in a version of the console room that never existed anymore* from two loved ones who aren't really there anyway. Probably takes place post-S8, but this is a time machine, and continuity is a convenient fiction.





	

There are times, in his loneliest hours, he hears them. They’re whispers, they’re reminders, they’re murmured voices just around the corner, leading him coreward. In the heart of his best girl, there is a place for his deepest dreams, the dreams so foundational to his being that they come full-circle into truth. 

Somewhere in the TARDIS, there is a room. 

It’s a room in which reality is optional, but then, so is causality there, and the texture of one is very much thinner in the absence of the other.

It’s a console room, dimly lit as his own but darker, greener, cavernous like the interior of a drum, subterranean yet sweeping; pulsing, as the current version does at times, more with shadow than with light. 

It even smells subterranean, like cold, buried rock and seeping groundwater and dripping minerals, fossilised seas and the tinned air interior to a submarine. It echoes like one, too.

Pinprick lamps barely illuminate the curved walls, marking out their boundaries until perspective goes funny and they disappear far above into what might be the ceiling, what might be empty space. At the very centre, however, the time rotor glows more brightly than it ever does outside of memory, seeming to breathe. It should be blinding to look at, but out of modesty or consideration, it keeps its light contained.

Between the forbidding walls and the warm mirage of the console, a languid spiral stair. Two figures chase each other along it, laughing.

Their shoes clang against metal and their skirts swish by near the level of the Doctor’s head.

_You shouldn’t like her so much; don’t you remember what she did to you, when she was the last one?_

The answering voice speaks in concepts, not in words. _Don’t_ you _remember what we have been together?_

But he doesn’t, can’t see into the past she’s referencing; and the tense she uses, the one into which he translates her thought, is one he only knows from school, learned for theory and to describe the hypotheticals derived from time equations.

_Oh, don’t mind him, he’s always been rubbish at the temporal conditionals. Race you to the top!_

Clang, clang, clatter, and then the footsteps disappear into the distance overhead. The Doctor sweeps back his coattails and sits on the edge of the console platform, waiting. After a pause, the laughter, one voice girlish and the other more feline, can be heard again, descending at high speed. But no footsteps.

He looks up, bemused, just in time to see Missy and Idris sliding sidesaddle down the banister, around and around the outside edge of the grand staircase, until they come shooting off the end of it and tumble in a confused tangle of arms and legs and petticoats right into his lap. 

One of them kisses him, he isn’t sure which--there’s a lot of teeth and a lot of suction, but that doesn’t tell him anything; it could easily be either of them. Between being knocked over and being kissed, the Doctor is a bit breathless, but that’s all right. He doesn’t need a lot of air. 

“It’s good, isn’t it?” Missy’s smirking in a self-satisfied manner, and for a moment she isn’t Missy but a TARDIS memory of another Master, fevered creature beating out patterns on his hearts. The Doctor reaches out for the suddenly clenched fists, and the lights shift, and she’s Missy again, relaxing her fingers into his.

 _Was that incorrect?_ Idris asks. _He was here; that timeline has been conserved._

“No, that was fine,” the Doctor assures her (assures them). He reaches for her hand, too. She’s just a hologram, but she’s much more than that, and in this room her body is as much a physical presence as the archived desktop theme and the console he doesn’t remember. 

Missy glances between them, cunning, eyes wide and full of calculations. The Doctor narrows _his_ eyes at her with suspicion. “What?”

She smiles, biting her lip, and leans in to whisper to Idris, never taking her gaze from his features. He doesn’t know whether he feels like a mouse or prince. 

There’s a thrill to being both.

He could swear he hears a distant and thoughtful vworp-vworp as Idris listens, shooting sudden glances at him and studying him appraisingly. “Oh! Oh, yes, I do remember. You’ll be so pleased.”

“I was pleased, yes, very much so,” says Missy, smug, disentangling herself from them both and sitting back, hand still loosely intertwined with his.

Idris--his TARDIS, hard light representation of the human form it so briefly inhabited--lifts her petticoats and slides a leg over his hips to straddle him. He’d tell himself he doesn’t know where this is going, but this is Missy, and it’s pretty obvious, even to him, especially when Idris leans down over him and puts her hand between them. 

What he really doesn’t know is how Missy brought all this about in the first place. How Idris can be here, embodied again, how any of them can be, as close to alive as the universe will allow. Missy, playing with his fingers, reads the confusion in his mind and laughs at him. 

“Think of it as a present. You didn’t like the last one. This makes up for it, I think.”

**Author's Note:**

> *yes, that's right


End file.
